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It's a bad thing when the first thing you think of when you're flying through the Andes is that movie Alive! about the soccer team. (I hope I brought along enough Clif bars to nourish the survivors in a "worst case scenario"). ...but I digress. It's like really early in the morning (woke up at 4:00 AM...

As many of you know, I'm a fanatical NFL Green Bay Packers fan. My friend, former teammate, and Ohio native, Matt Hester , has spent the time building a relationship with the IT Department of his favorite team, the Cleveland Browns. Matt finally sat down with Gordon Foust , IT Director for the Browns...

This week marks the last week of work in the IT field for visionary and founder, Bill Gates. I’m sure many of you are reading stories all over the Internet about Bill, I thought I’d share a story about Bill as well. I joined Microsoft because I was a huge fan of their products, even back to when I was...

That's not a question. It's a statement. If you've ever spoken to me, or visited this blog previously, you know I'm about one of the most fanatic Green Bay Packers fans around. I don't have a single Brett Favre jersey.....I have three. I don't have a picture of a the Packers in my office......I have...

Well....as many of you can probably figure out, I've been remiss in my blogging as of late. Of course, there's no good excuse, except to put this in the context of "travel + content prep". Regardless.....I'm in fact back. This week is an interesting one. I'm actually up in Ottawa, Ontario for the Microsoft...

Holy crap it's cooooold . I'm certainly no lightweight when it comes to enduring cold...I'm from Wisconsin, I love the snow and ice, I play ice hockey, and I love to snowboard. I'm the guy who is walking around in a t-shirt when everyone else is wearing a jacket and sweater. I love it. I have to tell...

Okay, I know I'm late to the game on this, but I think it's absolutely terrific. I'm a big Star Wars fan so I'm glad I found it. It's a video series about Darth Vader's "less charismatic brother" who works at a grocery store. I love that this was created by some guys from Madison, WI.

I've been meaning to get back to the Book O' The Month club idea for awhile. My buddy Matt started the idea, and I'm glomming on, since I think it's a good one. Mitnick Recommended The book I just finished is entitled " Influence: Science and Practice " by Robert Cialdini. Before I dive into the why...

So many of you who have actually met me, or seen me speak, know that while I don't have any children....but I do have yellow lab pup named Dixie. Now Dixie is just about 14 months old, and as you can guess, is extremely energetic.. She's also pretty darn smart. She habitually will come over to my desk...

A good buddy of mine and fellow Texan runs this little 'ol blog, which is one of the Top 5 blogs hosted on TechNet. His name is Keith Combs and he, like his blahg , is a pretty amazing technical guru. When it came time to research the laptop I'm carrying now, I searched out Mr. Combs and asked him for...

My boss was right: You should go to Brazil in the winter and Canada in the summer. I thought I could endure. I've been to survival training, I've frozen my butt off in Dahlonega, Georgia in Mountain Phase of Ranger School . Nothing prepares you for the cold of Quebec. As the cabbie told me as I drove...

For those of you who don't regularly read Bruce Schneier's blog (or books for that matter), it's a pretty good read and one you should consider. He found a YouTube gem from the TV show "Family Guy" that shows Stewie doing some pen-testing of his own. This actually aired pre-9/11. Funny and a bit scary...

On the topic of "Ouch. Recently a Chinese Jin-class (Type 094) nuclear attack sub was picked up by a popular mapping application (not Windows Local.live.com....but the OTHER guys.) According to the Strategic Security Blog , it was imaged by a Quickbird satellite system. Of course, since this is China...

At Microsoft, we have a team of both internal and external vendors who spend their entire lives creating presentations for speakers like me. While the material is not always perfect, it is often a huge time saver. Unfortunately the material is not always applicable to what I'm going to be speaking on...

Bill Gates referred to them as the “the next generation of social networking” and touted them as a great plugin for Microsoft Outlook. If you're into plugins and tweaks, this is a really sweet little deal. In case you're wondering where Xobni got their name....it's "inbox" spelled backwards! They got...

Sorry for the long delay, but I’ve been on vacation and my wife is pretty adamant about me not checking email, posting blog entries, etc. I don’t think I need a break, but apparently I was wrong, so I took about 8 days of vacation. Of course, there are about a bunch of things I wanted to blog about in...

For those who attended one of the PDC conferences (2005, I think), you may remember this video. With the Vista/Office 2007/Exchange 2007 launches in full swing (and the fact that I watched Napoleon Dynamite for the umpteenth time earlier this week.....) I thought I'd go ahead and send out the link. Bill...

Okay, Matt Hester has scooped a terrific video on the future of the Halo series, from the people over at LoadingReadyRun . This is great stuff and worth the short 6 minutes that explains what will happen. You can click it above to watch the video. Definitely must see TV!

I wanted to thank Keith Combs and his excellent blog for reminding everyone of my man-crush on Jack Bauer. Someone pointed me to a terrific website and I just had to share. It's called " Top 100 Facts About Jack Bauer ". Here are some of the best: "The 2007 budget for the US Military covers Jack Bauer...

This is just too funny not to post. Things like this seem to happen pretty regularly here at Microsoft, especially when it refers to coffee. I guess coffee is liquid gold to our army of developers and running out is a serious issue. DCR is a "design change request" which we submit when we want a feature...

New Direction I got up nice and early and managed to drag myself over to the convention, to be sure I wouldn't miss Craig Mundie's keynote where he announced the new End-to-End Trust vision we've been hearing about internally for a few weeks. Craig delivered the keynote in a "fireside chat" format with...

Okay.....here's your daily Dilbert for the security crowd. Definitely one to print out and hang on the bulletin board. I love Mordac . You'll love what's he done for Dilbert in the past. (I really like his implementation of strong passwords).

The short answer is YES! However, I'm not going to be confined to a single breakout room like I was last year. (ESPNism: " You cannot stop him, you can only hope to contain him .") If you remember, we had such a huge amount of folks wanting to get into the session I did with the FBI that we had to turn...

This is just too awesome to miss. I always enjoy a good video, especially when it relates to security. I just recently bought a new SUV (traded in the 2004 Mustang GT convertible) with the new baby and now I’m very sad that I forgot to ask for this option when I did. The guys at DillonAero did a great...

I'm not Michael Howard . My software development background consisted of struggling through my two C++ classes in my undergraduate MIS program. Sure, I managed to convince my professors that I knew what a virtual function was and how it all worked, but I never really felt the "Call of the Code" like...